iPhone 4 and 4S

[swlee]

I am writing on here to see if anyone can help me regarding the stupidly high upgrade prices for the iphone 4s. My daughter was promised a new upgrade to the iphone 4s when her upgrade was available for a Christmas present and was shocked at how expensive the prices were. My whole family is with vodafone and has been for a number of years but we see this as no way to treat your customers.

She has been on a £31 a month contract for 18 months now and last year took her Blackberry into the Vodafone shop as it was acting up a bit with signal. They consequently told her it had water damage (when it has never been near water!) and refused to help her apart from giving her phone a system update. This unfortunately led to her phone completely breaking and refusing to turn on. Again, when she complained they refused to do anything because of the 'damage'.

As you can imagine this was rather frustrating for her having to pay £31 a month and using an old nokia phone we had at home and when she found out she was due for an early upgrade on the 15th Jan 2012 we agreed that we would pay for the upgrade as her Christmas present. After going into the shop today they said that she could get the iphone 4s at £190 and stay at £31 a month but would have to do it online. However, when we got home to upgrade we found they wanted £269 plus £55 for an early upgrade to stay at £31 a month, with her minutes, internet and texts severely reduced, which is stupid in my eyes.

I am deeply unhappy with these prices and hope that someone will be able to help me sort it out.

Many Thanks

[Nabs]

Hi swlee,

Sorry to hear about the issues you had with the blackberry. 

Upgrading early will never give you as many options as new customers would have as you are still in contract and paying off your existing phone. If you were to leave it to the actual end date of your contract you would get much better offers, and in a lot of cases much better offers than new customers. The exception to this is the iPhone.

Since the iPhone is such a high value handset the prices they sell at are pretty much fixed. In terms of the tariffs that are available any upgrade tariff will be the same as those available here for new customers, this is the same for the handset costs.

With regards to the upgrade fee this is put in place to cover the remaining cost of your old handset however in your case Vodafone may be able to do something to help with this one.

Your best bet would be to speak with the guys on @vodafoneukdeals twitter. They specialise in upgrades and new lines! For info on how to contact them head over here and follow the instructions. They are a small and very popular team so they may not reply straight away, stick around though as one of the team will get back to you as soon as they can.

One not i will add, the iPhone as i'm sure you can appreciate is a very popular handset and as such several models of it are currently out of stock. When you upgrade your priceplan will change immediatly, NOT when you recieve the handset! This could lead to a short time period where you are paying a slightly higher tariff  without getting your new handset.

[swlee]

Thank you very much. I shall try to sort that out tonight.

[PaulE]

Hi swlee, 

Nabs has given you some fantastic advice here, not least of which is to pop us an email

I've checked our email and queue and can't find one from you in there so I've sent you one out - hit reply and we'll be in touch as soon as we can for a chat

Paul

[Joemanu]

That's very interesting regarding the "water damaged Blackberry" same thing happened to me last September.
Phone was sent for repair and Vodafone claimed that the phone was water damaged. Never been near water I was then told that even if you use the phone when it's raining that it can damaged the phone.
I spoke to Blackberry technical and they said that was nonsense.
They also told me that there are two white dots one on the battery and the other in the battery compartment if they are both white then they are NOT water damaged. If the dots are RED then water has entered the phone.
In my case the two dots were/are white.
As for the upgrades if your a Vodafone customer the chances of a good deal I think are pretty remote. If your on Tmobile and join Vodafone you will get an amazing deal like my colleague did a deal that is not mentioned on the Vodafone web site.
He gets 900 mins anywhere, 1000 landline mins, unlimited txt and 1gb of data all for the 900 min tariff all on the iPhone 4s 16g.
My contracts up in June and I've virtually made my mind up that it's time for a change.